


In Sweden, and Elsewhere

by rillrill



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Domestic, Fame, Fluff, Idiots in Love, Life Partners, M/M, Nerd Husbands, Nobel Prize, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-25
Updated: 2014-06-25
Packaged: 2018-02-06 03:55:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1843432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillrill/pseuds/rillrill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Newt had just thrown down his end of the half-assembled bookshelf and shouted, “Whatever! It still makes </i>no sense<i> that two acclaimed and accomplished scientists with the combined brainpower of four average adults can’t put together a goddamn shelf!” Because, seriously, he can build an improvised neural bridge out of old lab machinery and an ancient Mr. Coffee, but he’s undone by three missing pegs? </i>Fuck <i>this.</i></p><p>Newt and Hermann rebuild, relocate, accept the Nobel Prize for Physics, fight over furniture, and strive to carve out a space for themselves in a world where they're inextricably linked - in the the press, in their personal lives, and in their own heads.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Sweden, and Elsewhere

It’s been ten months since the world didn’t end.

In a way, it’s a letdown. Not that Hermann would have preferred the alternative – he’s quite all right with the way things turned out, thank you very much – but for the world to just keep on turning, business as usual, after the past ten years of decimation? It’s strange. Incredibly so.

It’s been six months since the world didn’t end, and on 10 December, 2025, he’s dressed in white tie and tails, standing in a hotel ballroom in Stockholm, trying in vain to make Newton’s hair look at least _respectable_. The decision to award a joint Nobel Prize in physics to himself and Newton had been well-contested, with detractors complaining that it was too soon, too early, the breach may very well reopen within mere years, and yet here they are, here he is, fussing over his colleague-life-partner-fellow-world-saver’s hair. Which looks ridiculous.

“You couldn’t have at least _combed_ it?” he asks, finally giving up and stepping away. 

Newton snorts. “And ruin this whole look I have going on? We’re actually rock stars tonight, Herms, at least in the global academic sphere. You gotta relax. Enjoy it. Loosen up a bit. Because we have collectively got a real hot-scientists thing going on, like, secondary-characters-in-a-Bond-movie level. And besides, they managed to get me into this penguin suit, and if I’m going to keep my crazy-genius rep going, I’ve gotta have the hair. You look great, by the way. The look suits you. Smashing. Ol’ chap.”

“I am going to ignore everything you just said,” says Hermann, “but I assume the point is that I will not embarrass myself in front of the global press tonight by looking like, as I believe you once called me, ‘an owl on a graduation card?’”

“Okay, dude, first of all, that slipped out _one_ time, and you did look particularly owlish at the time – like _right now_ , that is how you looked! And secondly, I happen to like that look. On you. Not on me. It’s ridiculous. Settle down. Let my hair go.”

Hermann huffs and steps away. “Let the record show that you have harangued me into compliance, and when the people at _Time_ revoke our Person of the Year cover due to your looking like an itinerant maniac in front of the Nobel committee, let the record also show that it is not my fault.”

“Oh my God. Chill. You are so tense, Hermann.” Newton tugs at his tie knot, leaving it slightly askew, and Hermann has to fight back the urge to fix that as well. Now he’s just being obnoxious, letting himself look purposefully rumpled and a little bit crazy, because he knows it gets under Hermann’s skin, knows how much he craves order and neatness in every aspect of his life. _Their life_. Technically it’s _their_ life now, and he has to remember that. 

“You’re doing that on purpose,” Hermann hisses, and Newton just smirks. Yes, of course he is. “You’re an insolent shit.”

“ _Language_ , Doctor,” Newton says with mock consternation. “We’re a couple of Nobel Laureates, you reprobate.”

Hermann rolls his eyes and leans heavier on his cane. Behind them, someone calls out “Doctors!” and they turn into a shower of flashbulbs, smiling automatically by this point, Hermann’s more of a grimace while Newton, still much more comfortable in front of the camera, takes over. They work well together like this. They always have.

 

*

 

**_Time_ Magazine: Person of the Year, 2025  
** Dr. Newton Geiszler, The Rock Star Brainiac  
In 2025, the ambitious biologist took a life-threatening risk when the fate of the world hung in its balance. He lived to tell the tale—and earned a Nobel Prize for his trouble  
by Erin Green

_Dr. Newton Geiszler’s living room is filled with mementos of a life he never expected to live. A former child prodigy born in Berlin and raised in San Francisco by artist parents, Geiszler earned his first doctorate at age 15, rising to a full-time graduate teaching position at MIT by 22. But when the interdimensional rift opened in 2015, unleashing a decade’s worth of terror on Earth, he joined the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps—a chapter in his life that concluded with the closing of said breach earlier this year._

_And so the modest Greenwich Village apartment that Geiszler now shares with his former PPDC lab partner, Dr. Hermann Gottlieb—a fellow _Time_ honoree this year—now houses trophies from their kaiju-research years, alongside relics of the rich life they now lead together. Near a framed copy of their letter from the Nobel Prize Committee, there’s a photograph of Jaeger pilots Raleigh Becket and Mako Mori stooping to give Geiszler a tight, congratulatory hug. On a wall nearby hangs Geiszler’s vintage Fender guitar, hanging alongside a medal of honor from the United Nations._

_Geiszler, 36, now finds himself transformed into an icon of the scientific community. He wears the mantle well. Feisty, funny, and extroverted, Geiszler has been, at different points in his life, a leader. At 18, he published a paper on glial cells still regarded as a landmark in the neurobiology community. In 2017, he was credited with discovering and establishing multiple scientific properties of kaiju bioluminescence, known to the layman as “Kaiju Blue.” From 2019 to 2023, he was the undefeated captain of one of the Hong Kong Shatterdome’s two kickball teams. A gifted singer-songwriter, he now plays frequent drop-in shows at bars around New York._

_But like almost all veterans of the PPDC, the flamboyantly tattooed and effortlessly scruffy Geiszler remains affected by the ten years he spent at war. “We all made sacrifices. We all lost people we cared about. Nobody walked out of there without some scars, physical or mental,” he says._

_It was Geiszler’s ingenuity in creating a makeshift neural bridge to forge a “drift” with preserved kaiju remains that resulted in the closing of the breach. But this ingenuity was not without its costs. “I mean, we’re talking about an incredibly complex piece of engineering, one that took years to perfect, being built by hand by a guy with a background primarily in biology,” says Geiszler. “Of course it was dangerous. I knew that going in.” To this day, Geiszler and his partner, Dr. Gottlieb, who participated in the second of two kaiju drifts, suffer occasional nosebleeds and “neurological feedback.”_

_But in the face of the impending apocalypse, he says, “There was no question, dude. We did what we had to do.”_

 

*

 

They spend four days in Stockholm.

Hermann navigates around the city speaking perfect Swedish, because of course he does, Newt thinks, rolling his eyes so hard he’s briefly afraid he’ll bring on another nosebleed. It’s not news to him or anything, he learned that the first time he tried to joke that “IKEA is Swedish for argument,” to which Hermann gave him that owlish look and responded, “Actually, ‘IKEA’ is an acronym for ‘Ingvar Kamprad, Elmtaryd, Agunnaryd,’ and you’ve pronounced it wrong, by the way, it’s actually ‘Ee-kaya.’”

Newt had just thrown down his end of the half-assembled bookshelf and shouted, “Whatever! It still makes _no sense_ that two acclaimed and accomplished scientists with the combined brainpower of four average adults can’t put together a goddamn shelf!” Because, seriously, he can build an improvised neural bridge out of old lab machinery and an ancient Mr. Coffee, but he’s undone by three missing pegs? _Fuck this_.

Anyway, point is, Hermann navigates around Stockholm speaking Swedish with perfect grammar and even correcting some of the spelling he sees on storefronts and restaurant menus, and Newt impresses with the few words he knows (“syrgasmask” means “oxygen mask,” he remembers that much). After three days of business dinners and dutiful entertaining of committee members and foreign press agents, they walk into a divey-looking bar, and Newt relaxes.

Not that he’s tense. "Tense" is not _necessarily_ the word. But it’s been a long week – a long few weeks, a long month, a long four months since they packed their bags and left the PPDC, their services no longer officially necessary under the new circumstances, their final reports edited and filed and literary agents and university faculty starting to beat down their collective door at a near-deafening volume. 

It was never officially stated that they were a package deal. But NYU made the joint offer – and it was a _very good_ offer, one that neither of them was ready to refuse, fiscally speaking. Tenure for two, plenty of research funding, teach one class a semester in the upper-level graduate school. NYU took both of them and thank God for that, at least.

So they move. They find an apartment in the East Village that appeals to Newt's latent-nostalgic punk sensibilities but also has a fantastic set of stained-glass windows that appeals to Hermann's weird English-boarding-school memories, and they move to America, Hermann making his displeasure about the entire process widely known, like he didn't spend the first three years of his PPDC service in Anchorage, which was way more American than New York, which is practically Europe, when you think about it, says Newt. NYU's no MIT, but the benefits far outweigh the costs, and besides, they both need to start anew. Hermann's first choice is Cambridge - England, not Massachusetts - and there's no way Newt's moving to the English countryside, not least because he's not offered a position there.

So they move to New York. Which seems like a happy medium. They buy real winter clothing and IKEA bookshelves and fight over takeout menus and appropriate wifi passwords. Newt calls Hermann a phenomenally dull stuffed shirt and Hermann calls him a lackadaisical degenerate, and they both go to bed annoyed and trying not to bleed on the linens.

When he first kisses Hermann, it's been two hours since the breach is shut, and they're both drunk on the drift and lack of sleep and the knowledge that they’ve both just _saved the world_ and thus there’s nothing holding them back now, no what-ifs and worst case scenarios reversing their polarity at the last possible second. The next time, they're extremely, painfully sober and Hermann pulls away and blinks, in shockingly inarticulate form, "Oh, are we doing the - _romantic... thing_ now?"

"Well. Uh. Dude. We're not _not_ doing it," says Newt, and Hermann blinks twice and says "Okay," and kisses him back. _Occam's razor, bitch_. Fortune favors the bold, and what not. And in retrospect, after all those years fighting each other and fighting the attraction they both knew to be there, it just makes sense - falling into a relationship, or at least a strange facsimile of one, where one or both parties is bleeding from at least one facial orifice most of the time and they can kind of hear each other's thoughts if they're not actively trying to listen, is the easiest thing they've ever done. At least, that's how Newt sees it.

So they move to New York, and they fight like an old married couple as always. "You ruin every April first," grouses Hermann when he opens his desk drawer to find that Newt has wrapped everything inside in a double layer of aluminum foil. “You ruin the first of everything!” Newt shouts back, and they’re off to the races, same as ever, and this actually feels like the best of all possible outcomes.

So. They walk into this bar in Stockholm - and why is it that so many great stories start that way? Two guys walk into a bar, dot dot dot. It's like the classic set-up. Anyway. Point is. Two world-famous scientists walk into a bar - one scowling, the other complaining, "Look, how is it my fault that I didn't know the Swedish for 'chlamydia?" And it's like, for the first time that week, an expectant silence doesn't sweep the place as soon as they walk in. It's refreshing. The clientele looks like something out of a Scandinavian noir movie, mostly seedy-looking grifter and enforcer types of various Nordic and Eastern European extractions, and the bartender doesn't bat an eye as Newt walks up to the bar and orders a pair of whiskeys, neat, because it's Friday night and they're going to have a good strong drink and relax.

Hermann is slightly better with foreign currency than Newt, only because he probably calculates exchange rates for fun inside that fantastic mind he has, and so he pays for the both of them. They sink down into a booth and breathe a sigh of relief, and Hermann sheds his parka for the first time all day, it’s just.

It’s perfect.

“I can hear you thinking,” says Newt, and he thinks about how many times he’s heard that line in badly written books and movies, and it’s strange how all those years, he took it at face value, never thought about how weird it would be to have someone else’s thoughts echo, unwarranted and unwanted, in your own brain, like the snippets of songs coming through the radio static between stations. 

 

*

 

**_Time_ Magazine: Person of the Year, 2025  
** Dr. Hermann Gottlieb, The Apocalypse Prophet  
He pulled off the year’s most spectacular methodological soothsaying. Post-drift, the Nobel Laureate physicist has become the world’s most wanted mathematical mind.  
by Gavin Steele

_Twenty-seven hours after flying from Hong Kong to New York—on a sold-out flight in coach, nonetheless—Dr. Hermann Gottlieb, unslept but not significantly worse for wear, stood in the presidential suite in the Plaza Hotel as the international news media announced his shared Nobel Prize in Physics with longtime research partner Dr. Newton Geiszler, for their work in closing the interdimensional breach responsible for ten years’ worth of devastation. Gottlieb, a staunchly methodological mathematician and physicist, played by the book for close to a decade under his employment with the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps. Years of predictions led him to predict the rising rate of kaiju attacks leading to the double event that leveled much of coastal Hong Kong within a three-hour period this year, and it was his analysis of the breach that allowed the PPDC to carry out the mission that closed the rift and ended the ten-year siege._

_But Gottlieb, 38, is unusually self-effacing about his role in averting the end of the world. Born in the rural German village of Algermissen, Gottlieb was raised primarily in Munich and educated abroad at Eton and Cambridge in the United Kingdom. After earning two graduate degrees in engineering and applied sciences in Berlin, he returned to the UK as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford before being recruited to the PPDC in 2015. Despite his decorated C.V., Gottlieb brushes off praise, stressing the role of teamwork in closing the breach. “Everyone involved was absolutely vital in their own way,” he says. “We all saved each other’s lives at one point or another. I owe everyone at the Hong Kong Shatterdome my life.”_

_Implicit in that statement is Gottlieb’s debt of gratitude toward his lab partner, Dr. Geiszler, with whom he now shares an apartment in New York’s East Village. The pair have recently accepted tenured positions at New York University, and while Gottlieb is reticent to discuss the specifics of their relationship—be it strictly academic or something more—he is effusive in his praise for Geiszler’s mind. “The man built a neural bridge out of laboratory debris and initiated a drift with a bit of dead alien tissue, knowing fully well it could kill him,” Gottlieb spits when the issue of Geiszler’s well-contested inclusion on the Nobel short list comes up. “As infuriating as his research habits may be for those around him, there’s no doubt that the man operates on a level worth recognizing.” From the normally taciturn Dr. Gottlieb, this constitutes high praise._

_The decision to award the Nobel to Gottlieb and Geiszler solely in the discipline of physics angered some members of the scientific community, with Dr. Angela Christopher, a professor of applied biology at UCLA, writing a recent op-ed in the New York Times stating that the erasure of Geiszler’s discipline constituted a moral failing on the part of the Nobel Committee. But, Gottlieb is quick to note, it was his own work on the development of the Jaeger program and the neural handshake system that enabled Geiszler to safely enter a drift state with kaiju remains. “The way it works,” says Gottlieb, “is that Newton has the big ideas and I make it possible and somewhat safe to execute them. It’s a symbiotic relationship. There are trade-offs, and there are compromises. Anything we do is going to be slightly imperfect.”_

 

*

 

It marks the first time that two people have shared the official Person of the Year cover, and Hermann is not insignificantly buoyed by this. He frames a copy in their brick-walled living room, on the wall between Newton’s Fender and mounted vinyl, and cooks dinner their first night back in New York, letting Newton practice Swedish on him and leaning against the counter to steal kisses while the broccoli steams.

He rolls up his shirtsleeves and pushes up the sleeves of his sweaters on top of them and watches from the corner of his eye as Newton bites his lip in the subtle way he doesn’t think anyone notices. Hermann has noticed for a long time, thank you very much.

Ten months ago, the Shatterdome had erupted into jubilant catharsis as the numbers on the war clock filed down to zero, Newton had kissed him hard, with ten years’ of built-up tension and rage and desire and fear coursing through both of their veins. His hand at the small of Newton’s back and the other at his scruffy cheek, their skin still grimy and sweaty and utterly disheveled from having played no minor part in averting the apocalypse. And Hermann had kissed back, his fingers carded through Newton’s _utterly ridiculous_ hair, glasses around his neck and his eye threatening to spew blood at any moment. 

Everyone around them was screaming and crying and hugging and snorting snot all over each other, and no one really noticed. Hermann thinks he remembers Tendo muttering “It’s about time,” but he can’t be sure. There was a raging party later, where they got good and sloshed on scotch (him) and vodka (Newton), hugged and were hugged by far too many people, and finally returned to Hermann’s room at dawn. He remembers waking up with a raging hangover and blood all over his face, and Newton on the floor beside him, evidently never having made it to the bed, but the war was over and they ended it and somewhere out there, Mako and Raleigh were being prepped for early-morning TV interviews while the good doctors Gottlieb and Geiszler got to drink black coffee and argue and continue avoiding saying the worlds they’d made a habit of avoiding for the better part of the past decade.

Back in the present, Newton rambles out loud about the _completely awesome_ things they could do with the Nobel money, because seriously, they’re not going to have to worry about money ever again at this rate, and Hermann mumbles that if Newton has his way they’ll be flat broke by 2030, but some of the ideas still appeal to him – research trips to cities along the Atlantic Coast they thought they might never get to visit together, some better furniture for the apartment that at least comes pre-assembled. 

“I should buy a drum set,” Newton thinks out loud.

“If you are set on buying a drum set, I suggest you also look for a new partner,” Hermann says dryly, without looking up from where he’s stirring the curry sauce on the stove. “And, more likely than not, new neighbors as well.”

“Ugh, you’re such a stick in the mud,” Newton says. “I’m definitely buying a couple amps, at least.”

Hermann smiles in spite of himself.

He may very well have found himself in the best of all possible universes. 

Other than the nosebleeds.

**Author's Note:**

> This is so doofy and happy and totally out of character for me, but sometimes you're drinking with your friend of ALMOST TEN YEARS and she goes "... You know what the _whole thing_ behind most of my recent songwriting is?" and you go "Yeah, [Designations](http://archiveofourown.org/works/927457), duh," and she loses her shit and you lose your shit and then you snapchat a bunch a photos of yourselves with nosebleeds and glasses and nerd husband sweaters to your OTHER friend of ALMOST TEN YEARS who is ALSO super into this pairing and that particular piece of fanwork brilliance, and everything's great and all the shit in the world has officially been lost? Anyway, point is, this is 80% for [Ally](http://allyspock.tumblr.com) and 20% for everyone else in the world. Nerd husbands 4evs.


End file.
